Whole Happiness

"Your happiness could be contagious," the headline read (Melissa Dahl, MSNBC, December 4), and who is not going to stop and read an article that describes the state of joy as a catching kind of virus, with Framington Heart Study researchers "able to measure a three-degree spread of (one) person's cheer"?

"On average," the researchers wrote, "every happy person in your social network increases your chance of cheer by 9 percent—and the effects of catching someone else's happiness lasts up to one year." A "stranger's good mood" packs more wallop than a pay raise. It enhances health, fuels longevity. It rests responsibility for reverberating goodness right back where it belongs: on the shoulders of each one of us.

If such is the case (and from now, I'm banking on it), my own life was extended immeasurably last night at Julia and Gene's gracious home, where we celebrated the happiness of parents-to-be, Cristina and Jeremy. In that big, Wissahickon-schist house with a hallway built for waltzing, we were teachers, entrepreneurs, students, those just starting out on a career and those weighing the possibility of new directions. We were, in other words, the ballroom dancers who have found their way to a studio called Dancesport and who have, in the course of going toe-to-toe with the party samba, the pass-your-feet foxtrot, the too-fast cha-cha, the deep-kneed bolero, and the go-slow-so-you-can-dance-it-fast salsa, forged a community of the viral-happiness variety.

Last night was whole. It was warm and good and moving and right—a fire in the fireplace, a to-die-for spread, cloth napkins!, provocatively shaped forks, a Georgette-caliber cake (and that would make it quite a cake), a child named Mercy taking notes, and a father-to-be's expression of love for the woman whom he has chosen as his wife.

I will float on this happiness for weeks to come.