laughter

Laughter is a great thing- one of my favorite things. I love to laugh, but I especially enjoy hearing people laugh. I have always hoped that I will spend my last days in a room full of people that can make me laugh and whose laugher I love to hear. In one fell swoop I went from laughter to my dead bed, a sure indication that laughter is critical to my well being. I read that the average person laughs 17 times a day. That’s impressive, I thought.

Some people have the most incredible laughs. There are certain people in my life whose laughter I can still hear after many years of absence. I have an old friend, that to this day, when I hear or see something that I know would strike him funny, I swear to you I can hear him laughing as if we were in the same room together. I can hear him so clearly laughing with such joy that my jaw aches from the stretch of my smile. I have another friend whose laughter makes me laugh so hard I almost always have to beg her to stop so I can catch my breath. I never quite know what she is laughing about, but it doesn’t matter really.

My father can make me split a gut laughing. He is the best story teller I have ever known and a brilliant joke teller. I especially love when he tells jokes in Greek. There is something about the language itself that is funny to me, so many different words and ways of expressing ideas that are lacking in English. My mother used to laugh like hell at my father even after she had so much frontal lobe damage that she couldn’t move her body, she still laughed with zeal at my father telling the same old stories she had heard a hundred times. This is true love.

TAKE- AWAY POINT: I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose. ~Woody Allen


Here is to brilliant laugh!