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Smile-breaks

Hilariously funny

     I'm supposed to write something hilariously funny for you all to laugh at and I'm at a complete loss. When was the last time I laughed hilariously? Paul, my son, does it all the time. He'll be sitting in the passenger seat of our car, singing along with the Sirius Love channel's love song and all of a sudden he'll burst into giggles. Hard giggles. Giggles that shake his shoulders and belly and most of the rest of him. Sometimes I even see his seatbelt shaking.

     I have to ask, even though I'm pretty sure it will be one of the two or three current things he finds hilariously funny these days. He can't answer. He's laughing too hard. I wait. He takes a deep breath and opens his mouth.

     "Remember. . .?" Giggles take over again. I wait, starting to feel a bit giggly myself. Hard to keep a straight face when the person next to you is shaking with laughter. Still, I manage. Finally he stops giggling long enough to get it out. "Remember when Grangoldie's wig blew off?"

     Grangoldie was his great-grandmother, always perfectly coiffed, a fashion plate well into her eighties, her make-up applied with precision, her gloves, shoes and handbag perfectly coordinated and her dress the proper length and style. In her later years, her perfectly coiffed hair was exchanged for a perfectly coiffed wig, to hide her thinning gray hairs. A petite woman, Grangoldie wouldn't be caught dead without being perfectly assembled.  

     Now Paul's really getting into it, telling the story with gusto. "We were driving along and she opened the window and "WHOOSH! a big gust of wind blew her wig out the window. I was sitting in the back seat laughing so hard!" He demonstrates the "whoosh" with his arms flung out. "Did we get the wig back?" Paul asks me. I tell him yes.

     All this happened decades ago, but Paul remembers it like it was yesterday. He loved his Grangoldie and knows how embarrassed she must have been, so he kindly explains, "I wasn't laughing at Grangoldie. I was laughing at the fact of her wig blowing off." That sets him off again.

     "Do you think Sister Yvonne would've laughed if she'd been there? Maybe she would've put me out in the hall," Paul says. Before school he told his friend he was "going to wrap her around my pinky." Donald said, "No way!" Donald was right and Sister Yvonne became Paul's hero for sticking to her guns.

     Grangoldie's wig isn't the only thing that sets Paul off. You never know when he's going to burst into giggles or start chuckling silently as he remembers a funny episode on TV or the last time he pulled a joke on someone. Driving down Jamacha Boulevard, looking at the hills in the distance he remembers the time his dad told him to watch for Martians coming up over the tops of the hills. Sometimes when I ask what's so funny, he says, "That's private," and that's that.

     If there's nothing funny going on, Paul to the rescue! "You're shoes are untied," he tells the Starbucks barista who's taking out the trash. "You dropped your cell phone," he tells the instructor at the Y. He giggles as they look down to check their shoes or look for their cell phone. Usually—not always, but usually—they laugh too, as they say, "You got me!'

     Nope. I don't have any hilariously funny stories to share. You'll have to go to Paul for that.

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