My wife Missy has many positive qualities. She’s smart. She’s beautiful. But if there’s one thing that’s always stood out, it’s her superhuman hearing. It’s good. Really good. Freakishly good.
Every once in a while, moments before I’m just about to fall asleep, Missy will roll over and ask me, “Do you hear that dog?”
“I do now,” I’ll grumble, immediately hearing a dog barking two neighborhoods away, which then keeps me from falling asleep. If it’s not a dog, it’s a squeaky garbage truck. Or an unidentifiable rattling somewhere in the back of her car. Or water slowly dripping on a tin roof after a downpour (which I now realize may be why we moved). Sometimes I think she can even hear my thoughts.
That’s the picture I had in my mind when I first heard the story about Walter and Gracie Lantz.
The couple married in 1940 and honeymooned at a lake, renting a cabin to enjoy the peace and quiet of the woods, away from the noisy hustle and bustle of Hollywood.
But there was a problem — every night before bed, a woodpecker would land on their roof and peck incessantly, keeping the couple up late into the night. The woodpecker visited every night.
One evening, there was a heavy rain and somehow, the pecking became even louder. That’s when Walter discovered that the woodpecker had bored a hole in the cabin’s roof. Walter insisted that he was going to shoot the thing (if it had been Missy and me, I’d like to think she would have gladly loaded the shotgun for me), but Gracie instead suggested that her husband use it as inspiration.
The woodpecker’s contemptuous laugh made Walter think that maybe Gracie was onto something.
What I haven’t told you yet is that Walter Lantz was a cartoonist. He had created a number of characters, including Baby-Face Mouse and Snuffy Skunk, which you’ve probably never heard of.
At the time that Walter married Gracie, he desperately needed a new character. And using his wife’s suggestion, Walter created Woody Woodpecker. Gracie even went on to voice the character.
For 40 years and 200 episodes, Gracie voiced Woody. When she and Walter were interviewed on their 50th wedding anniversary, Gracie said, “It was the best thing that ever happened to us.”
What could have been a terrible start of a marriage, especially if Walter had shot the thing, ended up being what made them both successful and brought the couple closer during in the process.
Makes me think we should be more deliberate in looking for the opportunities in our struggles.