Henrietta Hay's Column

I was listening recently to a group of women talking about their careers and their children. One of them commented that she has wonderful family, good friends and loves her job, but she isn't having any fun. Various suggestions were tossed around, and the best I could come up with was to double lock the bathroom door, and have a long, hot bubble bath with a glass of wine and a good mystery. But delightful as that is, maybe it isn't really fun if Webster knows what he is talking about. He says "fun" is anything that excites laughter or mirth. Let's expand the definition to include things we just want to do, that nobody, but nobody, says we should do or have to do.

A rather bitter, tongue in cheek Englishman named A. P. Herbert commented that, "People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any act of Parliament." Our Declaration of Independence, on the other hand, considers as an inalienable right "the pursuit of happiness", which is about as close you can get to governmental permission to have fun. It is really our patriotic duty to have fun, like motherhood and apple pie. But we've gotten a little careless about this duty.

Whatever happened to fun? Maybe life's too grim and we're too busy. Or maybe we just forgot how to have it. The nineties are not exactly a joyous time, but neither were a lot of other periods in our history. I can't believe that the pregnant pioneer woman bumping along over the Kansas prairies in a covered wagon was having all that much fun. But I'm sure she had her moments of it. Even Homer, who wrote some pretty grim stuff, exultantly cried, "Unextinguished laughter shakes the skies."

Or maybe we have just forgotten how to do it. Back in the '60's Eric Berne wrote a book called "Games people play." I hope my psychologist friends will forgive my butchering of psychological theory, but according to Berne, each of us has three "ego states" running around inside us. They are the parent, the child and the adult. The parent says, "I am the authority. Do as I say." The child has fun. The adult hopefully balances the two.

It's the child that has the fun. I suspect our problem is that our "child" has sort of gotten lost in the shuffle. The "child" part of me that I remember is playing baseball and our own particular brand of football along with a couple of other great kid games that have long been forgotten, Kick the Can and Run Sheep Run. Nobody told us when to play or how to play. And if memory has not completely deserted me, we had a lot of fun. Of course we weren't in training for High School football or trying out for the Broncos. There was no pressure to win and the only rules were the ones we made up.

So what does the child in us say is fun? I consulted with my kid expert on this matter. He allowed as how it depends on the kid. He actually got quite profound and commented that fun is a little like God. Nobody can really explain it. But he does think that skiing and Nintendo are fun. Maybe, but I have never heard a Nintendo player laugh out loud while playing.

As to skiing, I'm not a skier, but I'm sure fun is what a very prominent citizen of Grand Junction was having at Powderhorn some years ago. He was spotted lying on his back in the snow at the base of a ski run, waving his arms and legs back and forth to make an "angel" and commenting, "I've just died and gone to heaven."

Fun for me was celebrating my 65th birthday by going up very fast in a hot air balloon from the Library lawn and looking down at all the amazed people on the ground. That didn't leave much room for an encore the next year.

Fun is being with people whose funny bone is the same shape as mine, the mythical funny bone, that is. I just discovered why our elbows are called our funny bones. They are related to the humerus. Honest! Imagine, a Latin pun.

Fun is - well, whatever it is; we need to have more of it. It is our patriotic duty as Americans. But I'm not having any fun trying to figure it out.