My brother introduced us to pickleball while we were in Montana. Pickleball, a cross between ping-pong and tennis, involves hard plastic balls that take weird spins and hard paddles too short to actually reach the hard plastic balls. I only played after stipulating that I would not run to the ball or move laterally in either direction. So Karen and I were a team and John played solo. John and I shuffle when we run, and I staggered when reaching low for the ball, which spun out of reach before my bifocally befuddled eyes. Karen had a wicked backhand and moved more elegantly.
That is, she moved more elegantly until she decided to imitate my stagger, shrieking with laughter as she stumbled forward, blindly stabbing her paddle into the air in front of her knees. I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants, illustrating a different mode of cross-legged stagger as I clutched my stomach. Mom joined our laughter from the sidelines, her gleeful chuckles punctuating our game. John shouted, too, as he "ran" to pick up the loose balls.
It's been fifteen months since I laughed that hard, smiled until my cheeks hurt, wiped laughing tears from my eyes. Over a year of seriousness, of trying to smile and brace my family but struggling to find bottomless joy. My friends and I would chuckle ironically or throat-laugh at memes, but we all need to laugh until we cry, to be doubled by merriment. That pickleball game erased part of the traumatic COVID year from my psyche.
A good thing I found my laughter, since I came home to a doctor's text asking me to schedule my first colonoscopy. That text is the strangest happy birthday message I've ever received. And on the counter with my mail, a registration form courtesy of the AARP, listing the many benefits of membership. If those include uproarious laughter, I'm all in.
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