The Beloved's hands on her keyboard in our bedroom,
where she is working on rewrites for client blogs. We
do five of these each week day. I find them boring.
But the extra money is needed to fund our smoothie
crusade.
I remember a field of chokecherries off a roadside while I was courting the Beloved while she still lived with her parents and siblings in the old funeral home in Tioga.
There was one particular day I remember in late summer. The sun caressed the weedy fields as she and I drove to the chokecherry patch. I knew she was going to marry me when I asked her. And that anticipation made me so happy I thought I might become ill with impatience.
I had not felt such an intense and puzzling sense of joy since the missionaries had taught me the LDS discussions back on the Iron Lung at Ringling Brothers during rehearsals back in 1971. When they got to the part about the War in Heaven, my heart almost gave out on me and I had double vision. When I told the missionaries they would have to stop because I was ill they wisely replied that I was not ill at all -- I was experiencing the Holy Ghost testifying to me of the truthfulness of what they were telling me.
And so we arrived at the chokecherry patch. Where I unwisely asked the Beloved if one could eat chokecherries raw. With a masked smile she assured me they were sweet.
They were not. The first taste nearly caused my tongue to leap out of my mouth and run howling away like a dog who has sat on a cactus.
But then, my Beloved has always had a puckish sense of humor. Today whenever I ask her to make me an omelette she immediately replies "Poof! You're an omelette."
There is nothing in the world I love so much as to hear her laugh, whether at her own humorous japes or at something we are watching together. I had a glorious time when we watched the TV series Monk together. Her screeches of glee at the introverted detective's many foibles were like medicine to my heart. The sound washed away years of sorrow and doubt like a river of warm honey washing over me.
This day I have not heard her laugh very much. It makes me wish I had a magic artifact that I could rub or shake to cause her to giggle and chortle on command.
I don't think I ever did anything as a professional clown that ever made her laugh . . .
( I feel a certain pull to interject and say that he does make me laugh. He did make me laugh when we were courting. I laughed till I cried! – That is a title to a book written by the wife of Jerry Lewis, the comedian. She refers to the things that he did that were aimed at her to make her feel badly and actually hurt her and they were not funny any more. – There was a little of that going on with Tim and me. It feels like telling those things would not help anyone yet so it will be another time we might talk about some of those things.
He certainly did make me laugh. And he does make me laugh. Clouds of sadness did overtake me when we were married the first time so it happened like his selective hearing about the sweet/ sour berries. I learned from a study about human behavior that it takes ten times of doing goodness about a memory to overcome one bad memory. It holds true for me. I watched that formula work for my children in many instances too.
So the times I laughed at things he did as a professional clown… let me see. )
(Shock and awe are the things that usually get a laugh. The first time I heard his story about Mishu, the smallest man in the world, I laughed. The first time I saw his “sleepy man at church” routine, I laughed. When I hear him tell a new “did I ever tell you about the time. . .” , I laugh. He is always thinking of ways to make things new. And so we both laugh at bungles, foibles and mishaps. I think I really love to laugh. I smile at almost everyone as an automatic response to seeing a person. Keeping my smile – or keeping their smile – is dependent upon how receptive people are to me over time.)
No comments:
Post a Comment