Laughter: A Letter and Two Snaps

Dear Laughter,

   Thanks for stopping by. It always feels so much better when you’re here, especially when I’m already with someone else. No one needs to behave when you’re around and I love that. In fact when you don’t make an appearance, I feel like something is missing. I especially love it when you stop by unannounced, at a funeral for example, or meeting someone for the first time. Please know that you’re always welcome as far as I’m concerned, even when it seems like I am trying to silence you. Someone told me recently that laughing with another person is the closest you can get to them without touching, and I think that’s true. I hate it when you don’t show up. Please come back again soon.

xo

The Slide

I don’t know how or why we ended up at Raging Waters but there we were, in a line that felt like it stretched around the equator. Somewhere in the distance was where we wanted to be: a monumental plastic swirling structure that we were going to climb into, experience and get spit out of. My daughter Mo was about 9 and I’m pretty sure that at least one of my sisters was a teenager so we were all young enough to stand in a line in the heat without questioning life and re-evaluating our own purpose. But it was sweltering. It was the kind of heat where you have to shut down all feeling or emotion because it interferes with your survival. We shuffled forward with our heads down hoping there would be a pay off.

It started as soon as we got close to the stairs going up. The pay-off I mean. There was a mist of spray that helped and we brightened a bit, punchy and delirious in a way that got us up the stairs. Once we got to the top and sat in the tube/tire/boat, we were primed. Who knew that sitting in such a thing would be funny but it was? Butts low shoulders and arms high, it was awkward and ridiculous. As soon as we were pushed and the whole thing dropped into a swirl we were laughing like donkeys with our mouths wide open. All of us at once! We caught each other’s eyes for terrified milliseconds and then the boat would swirl and spin from one side to another like we were being flushed down a giant toilet bowl. Our sides were aching and burning and we were howling without a single sound coming out until we got spit out at the bottom where we all sighed in unison, looked at each other and said, Let’s do it again.

The Bell

Maybe it’s impossible to talk about laughing and expect it to be funny. It never is. It’s only funny in my own memory and even then, it’s not a thought but just as a sense of something. I feel it in the way my body gets weak, like one of those mini animals on a fat thimble that you press from under, it just collapses, boneless, in a heap. That feeling.

I can tell you it was another hot day, 95 degrees and humid, and we were hiking up a mountain in the bright sun. 5 miles up and 5 miles down. There were a few patches of shade with moss covered rocks where we could sit for a minute but it only meant we’d have to get up again, so it was bittersweet.

Halfway to the top, where the trail began to narrow and get more rocky, we met a man smoking a cigar while riding a horse. We stepped into a strange fairytale. He told us a long story in Italian, pointing to his horse, whose name may have been Malachi, the sky, and his belly, with a few shrugs and chef’s kisses thrown in. We laughed and said bene and prego and the other two or three words we knew how to say and then passed each other and continued on our way.

I could tell you what it was like being in another world with my sister, at a time when we both needed to be away from the one we knew, a place that was ancient and somehow both fictional and known, sweltering but invigorating, a place that all roads (everywhere, since humans have existed) lead to, but I won’t. By the time we reached the bell we felt weary, confused, hot, tired, pissed, punchy, injured and weak. The exact ingredients necessary for a laugh. I can’t tell you what was funny, it just was.