“Laughter is carbonated holiness.” ~Anne Lamott
I thought about going to services this morning; I even looked up which minister was speaking at the church I’ve been thinking about checking out.
Instead I ended up neck deep in a bubble bath, candles flickering, soft music playing, laughing SO hard that the bath water threatened to jump the tub and swamp the entire bathroom.
I LOVE to laugh, and there are a couple of authors I can always depend on to make me cackle out loud… Anne Lamott, Janet Evanovich, Terry Pratchett all come immediately to mind. I have laughed till I’ve cried on beaches, in airports, and on the EL at rush hour.
One of my all time favorite memories ever happened when my family was on summer vacation. We were staying in a house on a lake and everyone but my dad was awake and down on the beach.
Suddenly, we heard this wild howling coming from the house. We all leapt up and went running, the noise getting louder as we got closer. We burst through the door and thundered up the stairs to throw open the door to my parent’s room. And there was my dad…
He was sitting in the middle of the bed, literally shrieking with laughter. His face was bright red, the tears were streaming down his face; he was holding his chest as if he might laugh himself to pieces if he didn’t. It was absolutely infectious. Before I knew it, we were all rolling around on the bed giggling like mad.
Finally, we settled enough that he could share with us what he was reading. It was Stephen King’s The Body (which eventually became the movie Stand By Me). There’s a passage in there where one of the boys tells his friends a story that ends with an entire town throwing up on each other… pretty typical 12 year old boy stuff.
OH, but the way King tells it… we all ended up in hysterics all over again.
“Slowly, a sound started to build in Lardass’ stomach. A strange and scary sound, like a log truck coming at you at a hundred miles-an-hour. Suddenly, Lardass opened his mouth, and before Bill Travis knew it… he was covered with five pies worth of used blueberries. The women in the audience screamed. B ossman Bob Cormier took one look at Bill Travis and barfed on Principal Wiggins, who barfed on the lumberjack that was sitting next to him… But when the smell hit the crowd, that’s when Lardass’ plan really started to work. Girlfriends barfed on boyfriends. Kids barfed on their parents. A fat lady barfed in her purse. The Donnelley twins barfed on each other, and the Women’s Auxiliary barfed all over the Benevolent Order of Antelopes. And Lardass just sat back and enjoyed what he’d created-a complete and total barf-o-rama!”
And when it was over, I had the most wonderful, joyously wrung out feeling… I felt completely connected and bonded to these other beings in the bed, not only through family but by what we had just shared, with a sense that all was right with the world and always would be…
Not very different really than when I climbed out of the tub this morning.
Just because I didn’t leave the house this morning doesn’t mean I didn’t go to church…
“Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.” ~ Karl Barth
Wonderful! There is nothing more healing than infectious laughter.
This was a very warm and beautiful story. I love the way you tell it. I needed to read something nice today.
thank you