Tag Archives: laughter

Open Windows

Posted on by under Sound & Place

“Do you want to go back to bed?!? DO YOU WANT TO GO BACK TO BED?!?”

“Yes!” I grumbly murmured as I rolled over in bed and turned my back to the open window letting in the cool 5 a.m. August-air.

photo-1447154705288-7175737fb73cI was a couple weeks into my new apartment near Philadelphia. By now I was used to the 6 a.m. physical training drills as platoons of teenagers from the military college across the street marched to their practice field about 100 yards from my window. Five a.m. was new though. Someone must have done something wrong.

I knew my body well enough to know my night was over. I slid out of bed, trying to be quiet in case my roommate had managed to sleep through the earlier-than-normal P.T. routine. She’d be up early enough when they marched back to campus singing their cadence song in an hour or so.

I wandered into the kitchen to start the coffee and curled into the soft cushions of our couch, staring out the window into the front yard of the apartment complex until I heard the young cadets marching home again.

Leased from a local military college, my graduate school housing was a 1930s era apartment. Its wood floors were charming, and the sweetest floral pattern was etched into the bathroom mirror. The 1930s was the era of the fuse box which meant no air-conditioning and no window unit. So, we left our windows open.

Aside from the hot-July months when I had to escape to wander the mall all day lest I roast, I didn’t really mind it so much. I’m a couple years removed from that apartment now, and I rather miss needing to have my windows open. The always-conditioned cool air of Georgia summers seem rather stuffy in comparison.

Much of my graduate school classes focused on peace and non-violence. The irony that I was living on a military campus where teenagers marched by and sang about war on a daily basis was not lost on me.

The apartment buildings was surrounded by the military college and their football field, the parking lot for a large church (that was also a school), and a golf course. The golf course was mostly quiet.  

On Friday evenings in the fall, the football field filled up with high school sports. A marching band walked past my window, drumline in full performance. For every touchdown that the home team cadets made, a cannon blast pierced the air.

The cadets began the daily symphony early every morning and by 9:00 am there were sounds coming in from every direction. Children’s laughter from the church’s playground bounced across the mostly empty parking lot straight into our windows. On the other side of the road the bells of the college chapel began to ring on the hour at 9 a.m. and went until 5 p.m. Sometimes the bells counted the hour, sometimes they played a hymn.

On days when I had no classes these became familiar time-keepers, keeping me focused and paced as I read book after book after book after book. You don’t need any sort of advanced intelligence to attend grad school. You just need lots of time to read.

More often than not, I read past the end of the daily bells and was still working when one lone bugle broke through the dark night sky and played Taps. It’s the sound for lights out. I know it most from movies where it’s played at military funerals. And so my night often ended on a somber note. Not that I minded, I’ve always had an odd love for sad movies or songs or books. 

Every once in awhile there was a special evening conclusion to my daily concert. On clear nights, after the sun had set, there would be the faintest sound of bagpipes. I’d close my book and sit and listen to the peaceful tune as the crickets outside joined the song. This final piece of the day’s symphony would often go on for hours.

Throughout all of this – we grew skilled in making our own noise. Loud family dinners of neighbors and friends were rich with full-bellied laughter. We hooked a projector and speaker up to a laptop and watched movies or the latest episode of Sherlock in a volume that was probably too loud for the neighbors who didn’t join us. One summer, we streamed the World Cup games from the laptop and loudly cheered on the home teams among our group: Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and USA. Some nights we quietly listened to each other and shared our stories (to the soundtrack of bagpipes when we were lucky).

The golf course across the street had one noisy night a year – July 3rd – when they put on a fireworks show. The first year it surprised me and I ran to the window when my living room lit up bright red after a loud explosion. I had a perfect view from the second floor window. My last summer in that apartment the July 3rd show was rained out.

A few weeks later my roommate and I packed our cars and moving trucks full. All that was left in the apartment was the dorm-issued furniture and a small overnight bag. We were leaving bright and early the next morning.

As we prepared for bed, we heard a crack and boom and saw the flash of light outside. We moved one of the beds directly in front of the window, and sat next to each other as we leaned in towards the screen, listening and watching in delight as our neighborhood gave us a grand, thunderous, farewell.

 

*************************

Nicole bio YAH

 

A Fit of Adolescence

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

When I was twelve I began my confirmation into the church. In a class with eight other twelve-year-olds, we met on Tuesday afternoons for a couple of hours with the pastor. We stayed in a room decorated with mulberry, rust, and pine green accents. It was cold and always smelled of a craft store with its synthetic flowery stiffness, fake frosted berries in vases, and mini sepia portraits of past ministers. They sat in rigid chairs, unsmiling, staring at us from the past, some of them with a wife in a frilly blouses standing behind them. “Behold us,” their eyes seemed to say, “for we are the church.”

bible-study-1312533-1280x960The eight of us sat at a conference table directly under the overhead lights while Pastor Ahearn presided at the head. We read large portions of the Psalms each week, along with post-Reformation church history (no-one cared about pre-Reformation history for some reason), and learned rudimentary apologetics.

There were eight of us and one pastor in the low room behind the sanctuary. As very young aspiring members of the church, we were talked to regularly about our attitudes, our compulsive eye-rolling, and our desire to grow up too fast. One Sunday School teacher told me she liked that I was a soft-spoken young lady and the soft speech of women was a virtue in this day and age. I couldn’t for the life of me explain the ire that rose up in me.

“Thanks,” I said and gave her a tight smile. I ran off to the women’s bathroom with my friends so we could laugh our heads off at being “soft-spoken.”

It’s likely we deserved every talking-to that came our way.

Confirmation was always on the verge of a disaster. Our gentle and generally unflappable Pastor Ahearn was probably least suited to give lessons to a group of half-grown children who’d been equally preparing for adult faith and sarcasm.

As it was, we cracked.

* * * * *

After two and a half hours of Bible and church history on an afternoon in late January we stood up, stretched and rubbed our eyes, and went to stand in a circle with the other confirmands and Paster Ahearn. We bowed our heads as Pastor Ahearn extended his hands to a kid on either side of him. He motioned for the rest of us to do the same. We grasped each other’s hands and bowed our heads while the pastor began: “Gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you for…”

With that first sentence a strange thing happened. Someone snorted. There was a split second of silence. Pastor Ahearn resumed his prayer–”We thank You for each fine young woman and fine young man in this room”–but it was too late. The giggles had descended. After a few seconds I was horrified to find I couldn’t stop. None of us could. I opened my eyes and encountered the watery gaze of my peers, puffing and blowing to stop more giggles from erupting. I shut my eyes fast. The pastor went on relentlessly and so did we. “And we thank You for bringing each young person here to study every week in preparation for their confirmation…”

young-girl-4-1251377The praying went on.We giggled on. If the ground had opened up to swallow all of us, I would not have welcomed it more. Tears ran down my face. I opened one eye. My friends’ faces were teary and bloated. I sighed heavily through my giggles.

“Amen,” he intoned.

The giggles vanished. We dropped our hands and stared at one another with red-rimmed eyes. Pastor Ahearn smiled vaguely at us and wished us a good week and reminded us about our homework on Martin Luther’s 95 Theses.

Then we all filed out and into the dark parking lot where our parents were waiting in their cars for us. 

Elena bio YAH

The Apprentices

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

The peanut-gallery chatter was almost as entertaining as the 1970s-era slide show my dad was projecting on the wall. Not that I was surprised—I‘d expect nothing less when the Tennants and Sysyns got together.

Our two families have been spending time together since before my life began, but the regularity dipped considerably when us four kids grew up and started moving off on our own. Those stretches of years and miles made this particular reunion, in July 2015, especially epic: 14 of us from Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, and Oregon were gathered at a house on the Oregon coast. Our group represented three generations of two families: my dad’s and “Uncle” Pete’s, my dad’s best friend from college.

In preparation for the reunion, my dad—forever the obsessive photographer—had scanned five decades of slides to share. We watched the greatly-anticipated show our last night together.

photo 2 (2)The early 70s photos showcased my dad and Uncle Pete as beat-poet wannabes. Their weary faces suggested all-nighters spent drinking wine and listening to Miles Davis, scrawling verses in composition books and debating philosophy. But the scene around them tells the real story: four kids under the age of five, joining miniature forces to raise full-sized havoc. As adult versions of those kids, we laughed at the scene our little selves had created in the cramped apartment. Those poor beat poets had no idea what had hit them.

*  *  *  *  *

My beautiful picture

Pete (perhaps working on lyrics to the opera my dad scored).

Dad and Uncle Pete lived next door as college freshmen. Their love for the arts and their well-matched senses of humor sealed their friendship from the beginning, and they lost no time conjuring up the epic pranks they would one day tell their children about (again and again).

There was the time, for instance, when they changed the alarm clock of their dorm’s earliest riser, who had taken on the responsibility of pounding on everyone’s doors up and down the hall each morning to ensure no one overslept.

“You should have seen the guys all coming out of their rooms at three in the morning, ready to pummel poor George Lowe,” my Dad would say, hardly able to get through the telling of the story due to the laughter that erupted from within as he recalled the scene.

When my dad finds something really funny, he laughs in an extreme, choked up way, as if he’s on the verge of crying. My brother and I agree that watching Dad laugh is often more funny than whatever it is he’s laughing at.

The telling of the Alarm Clock Story was often paired with other classics, like the Co-ed Visiting Hours Story, about the time when my dad and a couple other guys on the floor managed to “lock” Pete alone in his dorm room during the university’s first ever co-ed open house.

“He missed the whole thing. We never heard the end of that,” Dad would say, his shaking shoulders indicating a level of laughter that was so extreme it was almost silent.

Not surprisingly, the hilarity at the core of Dad and Pete’s friendship inspired laughter and eye-rolling in the women who eventually married them, which later spilled over into our regular family gatherings each spring break, New Year’s Eve, and summer.

Soon us kids had a whole new generation of funny stories to recall together, from the dance routine we choreographed to the Xanadu album (one of my favorite gifts that Christmas), to the time our families met at a no-nonsense campground in Ohio late one night, unknowingly setting up our enormous shared tent terrifyingly close to train tracks. The rumbling and whistling of the train that woke us up in the dead of night set a new standard for a “rude awakening.”

*  *  *  *  *

The Epic Reunion slideshow continued, shifting from photos of busy toddlers and tired parents into a series of photos Dad and Pete staged for the singular purpose of annoying and alarming our mothers.

My beautiful picture

“Billy” on the brink of disaster.

“Look, there’s the time Billy almost fell into that canyon,” Uncle Pete said, pointing at the projected image of my brother’s eyes peeking over a stone ledge, apparently hanging on for dear life with his fingernails. “We were so relieved we made it back with him alive” Pete added in a stage whisper, ”We never would have heard the end of it from your mothers.”

Uncle Pete is the master of the elaborate aside, holding one hand flat along the edge of his mouth as if trying to keep what he’s saying from a select person or two. And my dad is the master of egging Pete on.

Together, they’re masters of laughter, and as the slideshow came to an end, I realized my brother and cousins and I have been their apprentices. I looked over at the faces of my own daughters—the third generation of this heritage of hilarity—and felt satisfied that our reunion week with the Sysyns had served as a solid orientation in their own schooling of stories and silliness. May they grow into adults who fully grasp the value of friendship, traditions, and pure, uncontrollable laughter.

 

Laughter Gives Life

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

On the day before my mother-in-law’s move to an assisted living facility, I had to meet the nurse supervisor to discuss details of the transfer. When I walked into the unit, a petite woman I’ll call Sallie approached me dressed in stretchy maroon pants and matching knit blouse, with perfect hair and deep maroon lips. Sallie took one of my hands and asked me my name. Then, she motioned me to lower my head and put my ear close. lrs1656In a conspiratorial, low tone of voice, she informed me that she runs the place, so come to her for anything I need. Sallie disappeared for about ten minutes, then returned, making a beeline for me, and repeated her introduction. “I run the place,” she said in a loud whisper.

The wait was long; the nurse was in a meeting. I sat on a sofa in the well-appointed gathering area. Across from me, a group of four women were sitting in a circle conversing—or at least one of them was. I waved—as I am liable to do to strangers—and the talkative one waved back and asked if I was moving in. She paused, looked at me again, and giggled.

In the meantime, a skinny-as-a-rail lady with pigtails, a crooked gait, one sneaker on and one off, approached the group of ladies and asked, with impaired but intelligible speech, if anyone could help her tie her shoes. Every one of them looked at her like she was crazy, except for the outgoing one, “Dorothy,” who said she would, but she didn’t think she could get down low enough to do it.

I called over to the lady with pigtails and told her I would be happy to help. She walked over, repeating: “You are so nice. You are so, so nice.” I wanted to tell her that my time is coming fast to have my shoes tied for me. I thought about Peter, and the Lord’s prediction about his old age: …when you are old you will stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you…

She plopped down on the couch; gravity robbed her of a slow, graceful descent. I got down on my knees, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get up if I bent over. I stretched the shoe she didn’t have on yet and got it about halfway on her foot. This was no Cinderella fit. While encouraging her to push her foot, I slipped a finger in the heel of the shoe. I took a deep breath to hide the pain of her heel pressing against my finger and the shoe, cutting off the circulation. She pushed her foot and I wiggled the shoe, sliding my finger out at the same time, and we did it. We got it on. I looked up. Her face was so close, our foreheads almost touched. She said thank-you with her eyes.

After tightening and lacing her shoestrings, I straightened up. “There you are,” I said. I silently thanked God, because he knew after weeks of stress what would fill up my empty well: Kneeling. Tying shoes. Smiling.

Dorothy came up and began talking a blue streak. She moved into the place one month ago and was eager to give me the low-down. “The food is good,” Dorothy exclaimed. She patted her belly like Winnie the Pooh.

At least five times, Dorothy told me a wonderful story about her farm, which was eight miles due east. She described cattle and chickens and the house she lived in alone for many years.

Dorothy’s face radiated mischief and joy. She said her family tells her that her memory is failing. She laughed: “Well, what do you ‘spect ? I am 87!” She walked toward one of the hallways. “I hope I can remember which room is mine. I’ve only been here ’bout a month.”  5907960975_de4c3564c8_z

Diminished mental faculties and physical deficits have not stopped the laughter. Dorothy found lots to laugh about. The lady in pigtails whose altered fine motor skills kept her from tying her shoes—smiled. Sallie enjoyed her job as greeter—the doorkeeper who served with purpose.

Theologian Karl Barth said: “Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.” I saw it that day. I felt it. And I laughed—not at them, but with them.

*****

Top right photo via Google Image, Creative Commons License

Lower left photo by Colin Gray, via Flickr, Creative Commons License

Lisa bio YAH

The Divine Secret of the Ho-Ho Sisterhood

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

Their husbands didn’t get it.

Lauren, Mary, Suzy, and I made plans to meet at Beth’s house near Chicago for a long April weekend. Lauren would drive in from Indianapolis, and Mary could handle the six-hour drive from St. Louis. Naturally, Suzy and I decided to make the trip to Beth’s together, from Pennsylvania.

Which is why we booked flights to St. Louis so that we could drive north to Beth’s house with Mary. Because, road trip.

This is what their husbands (and probably mine, if I had one) could not understand. It’s all about the journey.

*****

Our story really starts nearly 100 years ago.

In the early 1920s, Peter met Catherine at a church picnic. Peter was a young Ukrainian immigrant coal miner. Catherine, twelve years his junior, was the oldest daughter of Ukrainian immigrant parents.

Peter and Catherine married in 1923, and over the course of the next three decades, they had 12 children. My dad, John, was number nine. They eventually welcomed 36 grandchildren—I am number 22.

Mary and Suzy are the daughters of number eight, Patty. Lauren and Beth were born to Sonia, number ten. All five of us were born in the mid- to late-1960s, and although we’ve known each other all our lives, we were deeply into adulthood before we took the initiative to spend time together apart from the rest of our families.

*****

hostess-ho-hosLauren, Beth, and I dubbed ourselves “The Ho-Ho Sisterhood” in 2002, after an ill-advised trip to a Hostess Outlet store near Indianapolis. We had gathered at Lauren’s house to help prepare for a family reunion, and while running party-related errands, we each purchased a box full of our preferred snack cake. We then challenged each other to devour its entire contents on our way back to Lauren’s house.

None of us succeeded, although Beth insisted that she would have won the contest easily had we stopped to pick up a gallon of milk to wash them down.

We all felt a little ill, and our sides hurt. I think I managed to ingest four or five Ho-Hos—which was clearly three or four too many. But the stitch in my side had less to do with the volume of snack cakes and everything to do with the laughter.

We later inducted Mary and Suzy into the Sisterhood, minus the disgusting initiation ritual.

*****

Our inaugural Ho-Ho Sisterhood gathering at Beth’s house fell, appropriately, around April Fool’s Day.

Suzy and I ended up with a two-hour layover in Chicago’s O’Hare airport en route to meet up with Mary in St. Louis. The next day, we would drive six hours. To Chicago.

At this point, we wondered if maybe the husbands had a point.

Then we dismissed that idea. It’s all about the journey. We made this our new mantra.

But it was really all about the laughter. It started early between me and Suzy. On our boarding passes, our names were in all caps, and our first names and middle initials had been condensed into a single word. Suzy thought I was nuts when I first called her SUSANE. To this day, she calls me AMYL.

Mary picked us up at the St. Louis airport, and promptly took me to a local Urgent Care to treat my brand new sinus infection. She was the one suffering a bad head cold, which would likely have prevented her trip altogether had we not planned our group pilgrimage to Chicago.

ho-ho-sisters-trollsSUSANE and I congratulated ourselves for our combined intuition and foresight in routing our trip from Pennsylvania to Illinois through Missouri. The next morning, Mary and her box of Kleenex climbed into the backseat of her sedan, and Suzy and I took turns driving north to Beth and Lauren.

The itinerary of our weekend ended up having very little to do with Chicago. We did eventually visit the city’s IKEA store—but only after a pilgrimage to Hebron, Wisconsin, where we posed for photos with trolls and visited The Mustard Museum, where we witnessed Mary’s commencement from “Poupon U.”

We ate giant cinnamon rolls at The Machine Shed Restaurant before returning to Wisconsin to visit The Mars Cheese Castle, where an older gentleman complimented Lauren on her beautiful blue eyes. The rest of us reassured each other: “And you have eyes, too!”

Beth’s husband, David, dubbed himself the “Ho-Bro,” and graciously served as our chauffeur and photographer throughout the weekend.

In retrospect, it seems evident that we were just following the example set for us by our parents at every extended family event we ever attended. Whether a wedding, a holiday, a reunion, or even a funeral, only one element is as omnipresent at Maczuzak family gatherings as pierogies and coolers full of beer.

The laughter. It’s the lasting legacy of Peter and Catherine.

*****

 

Movie Nights

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

I sometimes joke that I grew up thirty years before I was born. I was born in the early 80s, but most of my frequently watched movies and television shows are from decades earlier. As a child, my family rarely had cable, but we did have a large video collection. Most of the videos were carefully recorded from TV onto VHS tapes. Small white stickers with black numbers were dutifully placed on each tape and then entered into a handwritten index. We had indexes listing our movies both by alphabetical order and by number order.

This was mostly  my mother’s influence. She loved the old movies and the shows, many created even before her childhood. They made her laugh, and Mom has always clung to the things that bring her joy. I recently took a vacation with a friend to Niagara Falls and she honored my desire to re-visit these childhood memories by driving an hour out of the way to see a giant mural of one of Lucille Ball’s famous scenes on the side of a building in her hometown of Jamestown, NY.

Posing with a Lucy mural in Jamestown, NY. December 2015.

Posing with a Lucy mural in Jamestown, NY. December 2015.

On Friday nights in my childhood, my two brothers and I would spread our sleeping bags on the patchwork-brown linoleum in the living room for family movie night. On the kitchen table Mom and Dad would put out Breyer’s vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, cool whip, and often some type of candy or sprinkles. We’d build our traditional Friday-Night-Sundae and sit on top of our sleeping bags — ready to laugh along as Jerry Lewis belts out a (rather catchy) song about beans in At War With The Army. Or, we would giggle for the hundredth time at Lucy and Ethel as they shoveled chocolates into their mouths. Sometimes we’d invite friends over; sometimes it was just us. There are dozens of movies (and television shows) in my head that I remember with smiles for the way they filled my childhood with laughter.  

Other times, we’d watch the movies late into the night. My parents would delay bedtime and press play on an old favorite because the night was special. Once, I was laying on the couch, my head in my mother’s lap as she raked her fingers through my bangs. We were watching one of Martin and Lewis’ movies. I would glance up every time I heard her laugh to see the light in her eyes. There were days that it was hard for Mom to smile. Days where Depression did its best to keep her isolated and numb. But there were other days that stretched into the night where joy, and laughter, were present. Those were nights we celebrated and embraced the joy.

I used to wonder why we didn’t watch the movies on the sad days, so that they would bring the laughter. It took me into my young adult years to understand that the laughter came on the late nights because the clouds lifted, not because the movies penetrated them.

This Christmas my younger brother and I stood in our parents’ hallway and scanned the movie collection, laughing in recognition at some of our old favorites. Much of the family gathered around the television and put in Dean Jones’ Snowball Express (Dad’s favorite) and we all laughed along as Jones flew backwards down the mountain, on skis. A few days later we pulled out North Avenue Irregulars to keep us awake as we counted down to the New Year. Mom and my brother had tears in their eyes from their laughter as Cloris Leachman rammed her car into a mobster who had caused her to break her newly-manicured nails.  

Those late night movie watching parties where Mom joined us in the laughter are treasured memories, but as an adult I think the work of joy is more evident in the every-Friday-night routine. Mom set up that routine and maintained it. Despite her own struggles, she made sure there was joy and laughter in the house for her kids. A joy that still pays off for us all these years later.

 

***************************************

Nicole bio YAH

In Which the People are the Place

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

It’s been going on for six years. The ten of us, five married couples, congregate from all over Lancaster County and gather at one of our houses for dinner. Or we meet at a restaurant. Or, like we did last Christmas, we all find our way to some underground concert venue in Center City, Philadelphia to hear Over the Rhine. I can’t remember whose idea that was, but it will certainly go down as one of the best dinner clubs ever. It doesn’t seem to matter where we go, because it’s always the same crew, and I’m learning that sometimes the people become the place.

It’s been going on for six years, almost every month, and there’s a kind of depth that time bestows on relationships, a kind of depth that can’t be microwaved. In the consistency of our gathering, seed after seed has been planted. We began in the awkward mask-wearing phase, only allowing others to see what we put forward. But then, suddenly, we were celebrating together. And grieving together. Layer after layer and before you know it, six years later, when I enter the place we are meeting and everyone is there, I feel an immense sigh of relief.

I can relax. These are my people.

Photo by Sanderson Images

Photo by Sanderson Images

* * * * *

Another thing that comes with time is laughter, loud laughter, the kind that has you waking up the next morning with sore abdominal muscles. The problem with choosing to conduct this dinner club in public is that our laughter, it can be rather…shall we say…boisterous.

* * * * *

We all stop talking and pay attention. It’s time for a story.

One of our friends tells us of his groundhog problem. They’re destroying his yard, leaving huge gaping wounds in his fields. So he wandered into a local Amish hardware store in search of a good groundhog trap.

That will work, he thought to himself.

My friend arrived home and realized he didn’t know how to set the trap, so he turned to the fount of all wisdom.

Youtube.

Soon he’s intently watching a hillbilly video (complete with banjo strumming in the background) in which a long-bearded, barefoot man illustrates the proper way to set that very same kind of groundhog trap. My friend’s kids gather around, drawn by the intrigue of the trap and the volume of the banjo picking.

Step one, step two, step three…my friend follows the man through the process of constructing the trap. This is good. This will work. Soon he has the trap opened into a cube shape. The man tells him to make sure the safety pin is in. My friend searches the inside of the trap for a safety pin.

That Amish guy didn’t give me the safety pin, he mumbles to himself, prying around inside the trap. Suddenly, the metal slams closed, down on his hands, trapping him in the trap. His kids stare at him, their eyes wide open. Excruciating pain shoots from his smashed fingers and all the way up his arms. He tries to hold in the obscenities. His children stare at him, not sure how to respond.

He trapped himself.

Groundhog, 1. My friend, 0.

* * * * *

Maybe some friends would exhibit a greater amount of sympathy – after all, he could have lost a finger in that trap. I’m sure the pain was unbearable. But what did the nine of us do?

We absolutely lost it with laughter. I cry when I laugh hard, and tears streamed down my face. We hooted and hollered and clapped him on the back at his misfortune. And in that laughter, that story, another fine layer added depth to the friendships around the table. Another shared piece of history. Another moment.

* * * * *

The place where we meet always changes, but the people are the same. I guess a lot of times the people are the place, probably more often than not. It’s something I’m learning, as life takes me and my family from here to there.

The people are the place.

shawn bio YAH

Good Grief!

Posted on by under Role & Place

I wonder how many “eye rolls” a mother receives from her child[ren] during her lifetime. My mom is eighty-one, and she can still provoke a heavenward roll of my eyes. Why should I be surprised when I catch my grown children having an ocular revolution as a sign of disapproval or exasperation for something I’ve said or done?

I don’t remember at what age my children began sighing, shrugging their shoulders, and baring their teeth at me.

“My role in life is to embarrass you,” I would declare to them with a relaxed smile.

*  *  *  *  *

chuck

(Image from “Peanuts” by Charles Schulz)

My twenty-four-year old son and I have a new tradition of meeting for breakfast a couple of times during the week. There is a locally owned breakfast spot we have dubbed, “our place,” but one recent morning, we decide to try the breakfast fare at a nationally-recognized restaurant known for its omelets, massive muffins, and pancakes.

When we arrive at the restaurant, the hostess shows us to a booth and gives us laminated, grease-smudged menus. K starts perusing the multiple pages of choices. I prop my elbows on the table and smile to myself while gazing at his handsome face. His new beard suits him. He looks tired. I wonder how late he stayed up the previous evening.

“Mama, decide what you want,” he implores. “I’m hungry.”

I sin by asking: “What time did you get in bed? You look tired.”

“Mama, I’m fine. I’m fine,” he says. “Good grief.”

The eyes roll.

I divert my attention to the menu. The “make your own omelet” looks enticing, as do the potato pancakes, but I haven’t had french toast in ages. I flip over a couple of pages, and I almost flip out.

“Oh, look. Their old people menu is for the fifty-five plus crowd,” I squeal.

This is a rite of passage for me, sort of like turning twenty-one and ordering my first adult beverage.

A fledgling waiter, followed by a geriatric waitress, approaches our table.

“Don’t say anything,” says K. “You will embarrass him.”

I am not an obedient mother.

“I promise I am fifty-six,” I announce as I order my cheap omelet.

The eyes roll.

*  *  *  *  *

The childish things never given up—a roll of the eye or a heaving sigh—are softening my transition into the fifty-five plus club. The easy banter I enjoy with my children serves as a buffer for my heart as they continue to grow away (or get away) from me.

I just have to roll with it.