Family Laughter

 I have my family tree behind the computer monitor and can see the top portion with all my siblings, their spouses, nieces and nephews behind the Google tabs on the screen. Rob and Aden designed and ordered the tree, which has handy birthdates (with year!) in the bubbles with the names of said nieces and nephews. We have eleven on the Clavadetscher side, and when birthdays come fast and furious I need to refer to the birth years to correctly calculate the number of dollar bills that should go in each card. 

Fortunate to have many supportive branches on that tree, I reached out to siblings and spouses yesterday with an ask to please read my blog. I was trying to achieve a PR of 2,000 page views for the month of January, forgetting that my last entry leaned heavily on menopause and menarche (or lack thereof). So when my brother, Mike, responded that he had obediently checked and read the blog, he texted, "just read about my sister's cycle being way off. Winning all around." 

This made me laugh - noteworthy on a weird day when the Tri-County Board of Health voted to end mask mandates this weekend (including in schools) a mere three weeks after they benched our swimmers for ten days after a positive COVID tests because "they can't wear masks in the pool." The rapid changes in societal rules literally give me whiplash.

Another funny incident from this week: Rob kindly did the dishes for me after I cooked pasta on Sunday night. He left two pans to dry near the sink, and when I strolled by on my way to a cup of tea, I pointed out that soap still ran down the outside of the pasta pot. "It doesn't matter," said Rob, "it's on the outside. No one cares."

I dropped my mug in disbelief. "Anyone who has ever washed dishes would care! You have to get soap off both sides - that's the point of rinsing."

We exchanged dish-related barbs for a few moments and I don't know if I convinced Rob, but I'm still in a bit of soap-related shock. When sharing this anecdote with a friend, she commented that she had recently read an article on the subject, so apparently there is an open question in the kitchen world on the harms of soap suds drying on the outside of a dish. I know which side I'm on - I may not care which way the toilet paper unrolls but I care about clean dishes; it was my chore growing up and I'm fairly intense about that (and a clean sink, right Mom?).

Anyway, my friend and I got a good laugh out of the story and that makes everything worthwhile. Keep laughing, friends, we made it through January and can all hope that the situation improves from  here. 

Laugh Until You Cry

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.