The short story “Gooseberries” was written by Anton Chekhov and published in 1898 in Russian Mind, a monthly magazine on culture and politics out of Moscow at the time. In the story, two men are walking along and one, Ivan Ivanovich, begins to tell a story. His telling is delayed when a rainstorm hits and they make a stop at a nearby friend’s house, spending the day with him, going for a swim on his land despite the rain, ogling his beautiful and lovely servant Pelagueya, and finishing up the story. Ivan’s story concerns his brother, who was obsessed with leaving his mundane paper-pushing job in order to own a farm that had a patch of gooseberries growing on it. Ivan’s brother is so single-minded in this pursuit that he marries an old rich woman and basically kills her with his frugality. When he finally buys the farm, he is happy, but Ivan notes the many ways in which it changes him: he neglected his wife, he treats the peasants in the village with condescension, he took on a different political ideology.
Ivan tells this story because he has come to believe that the idea of happiness being the purpose of life is a falsehood. He claims that those who are happy are only so because other people are unhappy and because those unhappy people suffer in silence. Or, at least, the happy people are not made aware enough of the suffering, whether by their own choice or others’. “Apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their burden in silence,” Ivan says in a stirring speech at the end of his anecdote, “but for which happiness would be impossible.”
But Chekhov undercuts his protagonist’s broad declarations at times; Ivan Ivanovich is not immune to being lulled into a happy state by things so unexpectedly joyous and cathartic that they transcend the philosophical idea of happiness. They are indescribable and create the emotional response of unbridled joy in someone, whether they are idealistically opposed to it or not. For Ivan, it’s things like seeing a beautiful woman or enjoying an outdoor swim during a rainstorm. Despite his grand proclamations that doing good, not being happy, is life’s purpose, he cannot help but experience happiness when confronted with these things.
For me, recently, it was live music. Going to shows used to be fundamental to my personhood; I would typically average a big concert every other week with other forms of live music—bar bands, livestreams, festivals—sprinkled in. Then there was a pandemic. Then there was a brief period of time where I could go to some shows but an unease was still in the air, crowds were still thin, and my concert-going partner rarely wanted to go and was frequently complaining of an affliction known as pregnancy. Then there came an as-of-yet unending period of time in which we had a small baby and could not go to shows. Then, recently, I returned to my Asbury Park stomping grounds for one of my favorite and most-seen bands, Houndmouth.
A quick background on the band and my relationship to it: I first saw Houndmouth in 2014 after the release of their first album, From the Hills Below the City. They were an alt-country/Americana kind of rock four-piece. While Matt Myers was the de facto frontman, they all sang on every song and frequently swapped lead vocals across the 23 tracks on their first two albums. The songs were high-energy roots rock with infectious choruses made to be sung along to.
They became more popular with the release of their second album, Little Neon Limelight, and I ended up seeing them five times in support of that album: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, and Philadelphia twice. These shows were electric. Everybody in attendance knew every song. During their most popular song—”Sedona”—at the Manhattan show, people greeted each chorus with a “so bright and pink” in unison (something that only comes on the third and final chorus of the recorded version of the song), an enthusiastic response that even the band was shocked by.
But the second Philly show was in 2016 and came less than a month after the news that keyboardist, sometimes-lead vocalist, and founding member Katie Toupin would be leaving the band suddenly without any real explanation (at the time, that is; she has since revealed that she left the band to get sober). This time, I showed up at Union Transfer with my father, who I had been inundating with all this hype for the Houndmouth live show experience, and they were not only Katie-less, they had replaced her with a three-piece horn section.
The energy was different, the songs were different, everything was different.
Now a trio, Houndmouth released an album that their fanbase absolutely hated. They were experimenting, probably a little lost and attempting to do new things, to grow despite this curveball. I contend that there are good songs on the album—Golden Age—but the production just doesn’t fit their style. The songs are more electronic, with a wider sonic palette that is trying to use the studio as an instrument itself. It didn’t work for them. They hit a real fallow period. Shows were sparsely attended, their website and social media went years without update, and there was even an Instagram account solely dedicated to mocking this album cycle. It was unclear to me whether or not they would even continue to be a band and if they would, if there would ever be another show like those 2015 shows.
I kept going, though. Which made this recent Asbury show, one of my first live music experiences in over a year, feel even more cathartic, more life-affirming, more full of unbridled joy. Their 2021 album, Good For You, was back to their default sound—the one they’re so good at. The songs are great and somehow, while I wasn’t looking, the music found its audience again. The Stone Pony was sold out; we could barely move. The packed house sang along, or hushed up when they played a new one or two. After all but giving up on ever feeling that again at a Houndmouth show, I was slapped in the face with the same thrill that Ivan found trying to swim and touch the bottom of the pond outside of Aliokhin’s farmhouse.
That story—finding something, falling in love, watching it dissipate into potential nothingness, then being completely surprised and overcome with happiness at its triumphant return—is, hopefully, just a microcosm of what it’s like to be a Philadelphia Flyers fan. The longer we stick with this team, watching others around us catch lucky breaks with lottery balls or free agent signings, digging headfirst into the day-to-day minutiae of a hockey team, getting our knickers in a twist over the smallest transactions, the sweeter that triumphant return is going to feel. And whether or not we believe that happiness is coming, that we even deserve that triumph in the first place, those beliefs won’t matter in the face of it actually happening. That’s when our subconscious mind will kick in.
There’s nothing wrong with being a bandwagon fan, but those of us who are here right now, writing about and reading about and paying to read about the Philadelphia Flyers during an NHL playoffs in which they’re not even partaking, we know we’re the real ones. This is our Golden Age and we’re sticking it out in search of that elusive happiness. We know that when that sweet, sweet moment comes, that it will somehow take all of these ups and downs into account and make the high even higher, an actual golden age. I honestly can’t even begin to understand or predict the feelings I will feel when the Flyers win the Stanley Cup, but I like to imagine that it’ll be something completely unexpected and completely ineffable. I can’t predict it now because I won’t be able to put it into words when it comes.
I firmly believe in not judging someone by their looks, and yet, like Ivan, I am still struck when I see someone that I consider traditionally beautiful. I believe that there are a million things that would serve to make the world a better place than the Flyers winning the cup, and yet, I know that when it happens it’ll be the single greatest thing in the world. We might tell ourselves that happiness is a falsehood, but sometimes, hopefully in the next decade or at least during my lifetime, we will experience a happiness that we will be unable to deny.
