【正文】 Hotels. I was relieved to see that each city was neatly pinpointed on a detailed map, and most had good descriptions to help me figure out where in Maine we should go in the first place.Then I found it: an old inn on the southern coast of Maine that rented us one of its best rooms for $100 a night. Guess what? It didn’t have a Website. I took my chances based on a good review, a great location and a bargain price. It wasn’t a log cabin, and it was far from the woods, but there were lace curtains, a hardwood floor and a quilt on the bed. With the ocean outside our window and a fireplace in the room, my holiday was just as cozy as I dreamed it would be.Arthritis allclear for high heelsFears that wearing highheeled shoes could lead to knee arthritis are unfounded,say researchers.But being overweight,smoking,and having a previous knee injury does increase the risk,the team from Oxford Brookes Universtity found.They looked at more than 100 women aged between 50 and 70 waiting for knee surgery, and found that choice of shoes was not a factorThe study was published in the Journal of Epidemilology and public health.More than 2% of the population aged over 55 suffers extreme pain as a result of osteoarthrits of the knee.The condition is twice as mon in 65yearold women as it is in men of the same age.Women39。 having a child and doing those Dad things like coaching my son’s baseball team, paddling around the creek in the boat while he’s swimming with the dogs, discovering his passion so deep it manifests even in his kindness to snails, his imagination so vivid he builds a spaceship from a scattered pile of Legos.But there is a vast meadow of life in the middle, where the bad and the good flipflop acrobatically. This is what convinces me to believe in the50percent spring I planted corn too early in a bottomland so floodprone that neighbors laughed. I felt chagrined at the wasted effort. Summer turned brutal—the worst heat wave and drought in my lifetime. The airconditioner died, the well went dry, the marriage ended, the job lost, the money gone. I was living lyrics from a country tune—music I disliked. Only a surging Kansas City Royals team, bound for their first World Series, buoyed my back on that horrible summer, I soon understood that all succeeding good things merely offset the bad. Worse than normal wouldn’t last long. I am owed and savor the peaceful and happy times. They reinvigorate me for the next nasty surprise and offer assurance that I can thrive.The 50 percent theory even helps me see hope beyond my Royals’ recent slump, a field of struggling rookies sown so that some year soon we can reap an October harvest. Oh, yeah, the corn crop? For that one blistering summer, the ground moisture was just right, planting early allowed pollination before heat withered the tops, and the lack of rain spared the standing corn from floods. That winter my crib overflowed with corn—fat, healthy threetoastalk ears filled with kernels from heel to tip—while my neighbors’ fields yielded only brown, empty husks.Although plantings past may have fallen below the 50percent expectation, and they probably will again in the future, I am still sustained by the crop that flourishes during the drought.The Road to HappinessIt is a monplace among moralists that you cannot get happiness by pursuing it. This is only true if you pursue it unwisely. Gamblers at Monte Carlo are pursuing money, and most of them lose it instead, but there are other ways of pursuing money, which often succeed. So it is with happiness. If you pursue it by means of drink, you are forgetting the hangover.Epicurus pursued it by living only in congenial society and eating only dry bread, supplemented by a little cheese on feast days. His method proved successful in his case, but he was a valetudinarian, and most people would need something more vigorous.For most people, the pursuit of happiness, unless supplemented in various ways, is too abstract and theoretical to be adequate as a personal rule of life. But I think that whatever personal rule of life you may choose it should not, except in rare and heroic cases, be inpatible with you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy, will see that they all have certain things in mon. The most important of these things is an activity which at most gradually builds up something that you are glad to see ing into existence.Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children can get this kind of satisfaction out of