Finding delight in small things can be easy as grilled cheese

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/10/2023 (1071 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the many newsletters I subscribe to mentioned cultivating a “delight practice.”

The writer, How To Break Up With Your Phone author Catherine Price, was inspired by The Book of Delights (2019) and The Book of (More) Delights (2023), a pair of essay collections by award-winning American poet Ross Gay.

A delight practice is what you’d imagine it to be: intentionally taking note, every day, of the things in your life that bring you joy and pleasure.

These things are usually small and much more specific than, say, “my friends and family” or whatever you said at the dinner table last weekend during Thanksgiving. Think: opening a perfectly ripe avocado. Sliding into fresh sheets. Saying hello to a tiny dog in a tiny sweater. You know, twee garbage like that.

You can perhaps sense that the idea of a “delight practice” made my eye twitch just a little bit because honestly it feels like, great, another thing to do. But it did remind me of one of my own small delights, which is watching characters in TV shows and movies privately enjoy their own small delights.

One of my favourite scenes in all of television comes from an episode of Freaks and Geeks, the gone-too-soon, 1980s-set teen dramedy from Paul Feig (Bridesmaids).

Bill (Martin Starr), one of the “geeks,” returns home from school and, like any good ’80s latchkey kid, fixes himself a grilled cheese sandwich. He eats in front of the TV, watching standup comedian Garry Shandling. He laughs alone, open-mouthed and unselfconscious, macerated sandwich visible in his mouth. We never hear him laugh — the scene is set to The Who’s I’m One — but the joy and pleasure he’s feeling in that moment is palpable.

(I was also delighted — yes, delighted! — to learn that this 90 seconds of television is many, many other people’s favourite TV moment, from anonymous YouTube commenters to New York Times chief TV critic James Poniewozik.)

I also love any scene in which a character is driving in a car alone, singing along to the radio.

Another Bill-and-his-grilled-cheese scene for me came courtesy of an episode in Season 2 of The Bear, in which Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) lets his gruff guard down and euphorically belts out Taylor Swift’s Love Story after finally finding his purpose.

I love James Gandolfini, lazily singing along to Steely Dan’s Dirty Work as Tony Soprano. I love Annette Bening’s nearly unhinged rendition of Bobby Darin’s Don’t Rain on My Parade in American Beauty. I love Tom Cruise’s slightly smarmy and self-satisfied Free Fallin’ in Jerry Maguire.

It’s not delight, per se, but I love Christina Applegate venting her grief and rage to death metal (specifically Excessum’s Rage Unrestrained) in Dead to Me.

Even Margot Robbie has a solo car-karaoke moment as Barbie in her pink convertible on the way to the Real World to the Indigo Girls’ Closer to Fine.

It’s a canny character-building device with obvious built-in soundtrack possibilities; how people behave alone, what they eat, what kind of music they listen to, whether or not they are good singers (or clearly think they are good singers), which songs they know the words to — all of these things reveal so much about someone.

But these scenes are also poignant reminders to delight in your own company.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com