The horror calls to me. All the awful things that I wake up to in the morning beg me to become consumed by them. A mass killing in Maine. The grind of the war in Ukraine and the slaughter in Israel and Gaza.

To say nothing of the spectacle of the Constitution of the United States being trampled in the name of partisan politics.

It’s depressing and consuming. But does it ruin my life? No, and it shouldn’t ruin yours, either.

When our children were small, I read to them from the “Little House on the Prairie” series. They enjoyed our nighttime routine, and so did I. (Even as our son’s voice began to change, he’d bark to his younger sister each evening, “Story time, Sarah.”)

Of those days, Laura Ingalls Wilder — born in 1867 in the “Big Woods” of Wisconsin and reared in hard times on a homestead in the Great Plains — said, “It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”

As my aging body and the world both seem to be coming apart, I find myself taking pleasure in small things, especially our 3-year-old grandson and the car we have named Uncle Poussin.

If you have grandchildren, you get this: When that little boy chases me around the house, with his arms outstretched and his fingers wiggling, shouting “I’m gonna get you” in his toddler dialect, I easily forget my troubles and the world’s. I am in the here-and-now for him.

Poussin David (pronounced “Poo-Sa Dah-veed”) was my great-uncle, obviously of French descent. I never knew much about him, but it must have been tough growing up in rural central Louisiana with a name pronounced by the more Americanized kids as “Puss-Ann.”

What would Uncle Poussin think if he knew he was the namesake of a 1953 French car being restored by my husband? I don’t know, but I have learned the simple joy of watching a very unusual automobile evolve from a tired and battered little car to a shining sedan that turns heads everywhere.

Beyond the pleasure of seeing something restored, there’s a lot of pleasure in the process itself.

The people who love these cars are a jolly lot. Earlier this year, I found myself under a tent at a car show in Carlisle, Pa., with a woman in a charming French outfit and a group of folks chatting excitedly about compression ratios and paint colors. One of the women started pouring wine, everyone was friendly, and I was hooked.

My late father-in-law was trained as a mechanic as a young man. He could fix all kinds of things. When my husband was a child, his father told him how they would buy and restore a Model-A Ford. It may have been the Early Times bourbon and 7-Up talking, because that father/son project never materialized.

My husband always laments his lack of ability when compared to his father. He will tell you he can’t fix anything. But that’s nonsense.

Over the past year or so, he has returned from the little garage on our property on weekend evenings, his coveralls smeared with grease. He is filthy. After a long soak in the tub, over a pint of Guinness he tells dinner guests about his latest mechanical adventure. The men seem interested; the women, less so.

It’s also fun to watch how the people in the local body shop have reacted to the long and tedious process of repairing and repainting Uncle Poussin. After snapping plastic parts on today’s plastic cars, repainting my husband’s car has been a simple pleasure much different from the tedium of dealing with insurance companies and impatient customers.

It has been fun to watch all of this happen. The old car can’t hold a candle to my grandchildren; nothing can. But the notion that we all should take small pleasures where we find them isn’t just a good idea; it’s a necessity for a stable and happy life.

If you want to concentrate on the horror of gun violence, war and attempts to destroy the Constitution, you can do that. There are plenty of folks who will encourage you. But if instead you try to balance all the woes of the world with the simple things in life that bring you joy, you can find some peace.

Will working on his old car bring back my husband’s boyhood dream of working on another old car with his daddy? No. Will playing “I’m gonna get you!” with our grandson erase the senseless violence of a shot-up bowling alley and restaurant in Maine? No.

Will those things let me find the balance in life that makes it worthwhile?

I know my answer. You ponder yours.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.