I Need to Laugh!

A snippet from my niece Nancy's blog today is the following, "I was getting dressed, while both boys were playing in the adjoining bathroom. I hear Owen say, "Joel! Enough with the tampons! Put them away." I read it and, alone at my kitchen table, I laughed aloud.

Nancy is the mom of two boys, ages three and one. Most everything she writes about the boys touches me because I've been there. While she gets understandably frustrated with their shenanigans, I have the luxury of idealized memory of those exhausting mothering years and often find myself laughing aloud at her story while remembering a similar event from 25 years ago. Nancy probably gets tired of my "Yeah, I remember when David or Kevin did the same thing." comments!

What I realized today, is that, aside from Nancy's blog, "House", and good times with girlfriends, I don't have too many opportunities to laugh aloud on a typical day. What I do have is a lot of absurdity. For example:

1. My mother's table mates, Molly and Sally, have been feuding. Yesterday Sally accidentally hit Molly's leg with the leg support of her wheelchair. Molly, who has the sweetest disposition in the world, yelled "Don't do that." Sally was so angry at being rebuked that she literally took her plate and sat at a different table. My mother was distressed that she was dragged into this spat because each woman wanted Mom on her side of the dispute. So today I asked Mom if Sally and Molly were still angry. Mom replied that she had asked Molly this morning if things were OK with Sally and was asked, "Why do you ask. Was there a problem?"

8th grade boys and toddler boys have the same reaction: yell and scream about an issue and then completely forget it occurred. Not a bad way to live!

2. Mom mentioned that they had french toast for breakfast today. I retorted with the classic family line, "Did you have toast with your french toast?" and she looked at me like I was crazy. Many, many years ago on a family trip to Florida we had an incredibly incompetent waitress who messed up an entire simple breakfast order but is most remembered for asking, "Do you want toast with your french toast?" I can't believe Mom forgot a classic family story! I wonder if she also forgot that, on that same trip, I bopped my brother on the head with "Blup Blup", a turquoise and yellow stuffed dog with a very hard music box buried inside the "fur", and Ed proceeded to vomit for several hours? That was probably the same trip during which we collected some pretty shells, put them in a bag on the back shelf of the car, and then had to live with the odor of baked dead snails all the way home. Ah, the absurdities of youth that we remember and cherish!

3. I gave blood today. Actually I gave platelets, a process that takes close to three hours. While my left arm was tied down, I attempted to read an actual serious book in my right hand. Unfortunately, there was a TV right in my line of sight. Although I couldn't hear it, my eyes kept being drawn to.......yes!.....the Maury Povich show. It was a "Back to School" show that featured attractive women gyrating in cheerleader outfits. The premise was, "Is the cheerleader really male or female?" I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP! Each woman came out, did her little dance, then Maury asked audience members what gender each "woman" was, then the sex was revealed......over and over again! The updated "score" flashed before every commercial break.

I've been fussing over the (in my opinion) stupidity of people who objected to the president telling kids to work hard in school or who think that Obama was born in Kenya or who think that the proposed health plan is going to have death squads to kill off Grandma. Maybe I'm wrong to brand those folks as "wrong". Based on my daytime TV watching today, I may have to change my view. Having an opinion--even a wrong one :-)-- about a political issue is way, way superior to predicting a cheerleader's sex.

So, I don't have many "laugh-out-louds" but I sure have lots of "If it weren't so sad, it would be funnys".