The Laugh of the Month

The other day my mother and I were having lunch at the Olive Garden. The acoustics were terrible, made worse by the fact there was a huge party of female office workers just across from us. My mother complained to me, saying something about how one friend says that whenever gypsies show up at her favorite restaurant, they’re real loud like that, too.

So, we’re doing the best we can to communicate, my mother telling me the funny stories of the week. I ask her about two of her friends, recently divorced. My mother is quoting the husband this way: “You know how Richard talks crazy. He said, ‘I ain’t gonna be no man mistress!’”

Right at that moment our tall, dark, very handsome waiter walks up, obviously hearing my mother, who is 77, say, “I ain’t gonna be no man’s mistress!”

I know he thought that because he burst into laughter, which he quickly tried to contain. I looked up at him and started laughing myself, then looked at my mother who hadn’t missed a beat, and was also starting to laugh. The waiter high-tailed it out of there, my mother watching him go no doubt back to the kitchen to tell what he’d just heard.

For a few glorious minutes, my mother and I enjoyed together the kind of cleansing Niagara Falls laughter that makes you feel like you’ve been reborn. My mother was clutching her stomach, tears filling her eyes, saying, “Stop, it hurts.” Just when we’d begin to recover, we’d relive the ludicrosy of of a 77 year old woman saying that to her 51 year old daughter and we’d go into convulsions again.

To Emily on Her 24th

This is a week of birthday posts. My daughter Emily wrote a great tribute to her father on her blog. This reminded me of a letter I wrote two years ago to her, and as her birthday was just yesterday, I post this now. I’m aware that all this gushing back and forth might be nauseating to some; if so, I apologize and reason that on any given day you’ll read things that you don’t care for. That said, here goes my letter to my oldest daughter Emily on her 24th birthday, now 26.

Dear Emily,

To this day I can see you in your little bassinet that first week of your life. We proudly changed you from the hospital’s t-shirt into a little pale green outfit that fit perfectly, marking you as ours, different from all the rest. I couldn’t believe that several hours before, you’d been floating in that other-world of wet, dark warmth, but had emerged perfectly formed, with skin clear and pink as if it had known the kiss of the sun and the air from the beginning.

I watched you as you looked around the small, plain room in the British Military Hospital, taking it all in – the wall, the corners, the ceiling, every little thing. I began to see things with fresh eyes – your eyes, the eyes of a human being thrust into a world yet to be experienced. Later I learned that newborns can’t see that far, but I don’t care. The experience was wonderful and profound, and I think, in a way, foundational for how I’ve approached being a parent.

I was awed by your very existence. There was a person who hadn’t been there before, taking her place in history, breathing her share of oxygen, making her voice heard in a world that had never heard that voice before. With your birth, as with all births, entered into the world a universe of will, of possibility. Within weeks, your hands began to grasp at everything in sight, another metaphor for that human determination to make the world your own.

And the years would bear this out. From your refusal to stay in our arms once you could squirm out of them in order to explore, to your insistence on wearing a dress every day no matter how cold, to your asking me when I was going to teach you how to fly, you were indeed always “doing your own thing”, as the Sesame Street song goes.

Even in your teenage years, while the other girls chose princess-like literary characters to dress up as, you chose to be the whale in Moby Dick. That mass of wire and tape and bed sheets resembled an albino Barney, but the strategically placed GI-Joe dressed as Captain Ahab with a spear and make-believe blood made it clear…well, almost. We laughed so hard we cried.

As those granted fellowship with the One who made you, we were blessed as parents to be guided by Him, learning as we went how to care for you. There were times when we did it all wrong, but I know that His grace was always there. We have been and are a privileged people.

You’ve turned out so well. We are so proud of you and Brian. It’s so great to see you building your life together; so wonderful to see your marriage reflect the realities in heaven – a groom loving and caring for his bride; the bride desiring to please the one who is now her protector and leader.

The backdrop of this letter is a week of horror in our world, as a young man - about your age, seeing the world as his enemy, pulled a trigger countless times, ending the lives of 32 people, each of whom was a universe of possibility, too.

So, I guess I’m dumbstruck with gratitude that I could have a child who, for every single day of her life, has added light and beauty to this world. And I’m so grateful that on this Saturday after the killings at Virginia Tech, after more bombings in Iraq, I know you are safe in Jackson, MS, answering the phone, “Emily O’Dell, Bike Shop”, no doubt scanning the landscape for possible photographs, considering a new recipe, planning to worship the God of your parents tomorrow morning. How those who lost a loved one must be longing for an ordinary day to make an ordinary phone call to their loved one.

Any life can bless or curse, give or take, create or destroy. You, and now Brian with you, are lights on a hill. May God continue to bless you and keep you and reach out to others through you.
Happy Birthday, precious one.