laugh a little

I've been lugubrious lately, sorry. (Not an anagram of Bela Lugosi, but close to it.)  So I was trying to recall something I've read that made me laugh out loud even while reading silently to myself, and I came up with two off the top.

One is a funeral scene from The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)  by Milan Kundera (b. 1929), the other a weaning party for a child addicted to her soother, in Digging to America (2006) by Anne Tyler (b. 1941).  A man loses his hat and it flies into the open grave and he wonders how to cope with it. The child will not give up her "binky" without an heroic struggle.  Both scenes, as I say, caused me to laugh out loud.  

I used to have a dog and he made me laugh, or at least, smile, every day.  Children do that, too, make you smile, if they and you are lucky,  I've been writing about laughter in my book and I came up with a line that I think is mine:  "Remembered laughter is present laughter."  If it isn't, don't tell me.

Now you tell me one.

 

I'm still here

Was yesterday a downer?  It wasn't meant to be.  When my son Matthew was just a little boy, he had to have a T&A (tonsils and adenoids). As you know, people aren't kept in hospital as long as they used to be and it's a good thing. (C'est difficile, n'est-ce pas?) Matt had to go in the night before his surgery. We went to see him before his bedtime and he was having a ball, running up and down the hall with his new best friends, playing with all the new toys, barely noticing us. Ever the realist, I reminded Matt that although he was having fun now, he mustn't forget that he was in for an operation and he'd wake up with a sore throat. 

"Not me," he said, barely missing a beat. "That other guy."

Yup. Me too. You too. The hardest thing in the world for us to contemplate is our own extinction: we cannot imagine it, the loss of consciousness, of self.  That is why, of course, that Alzheimer's and related dementia are so threatening. To be here physically and yet not to be here consciously is inconceivable.  Perhaps we who are allowed to live so long begin to get some inkling of what it means.  We certainly know perfectly well that we are not immortal.  We have an address book of crossed-out names to prove it as others are picked off around us.  

Well, I'm still here. I hope you are the same.